The Bird Man Comes to Mount Vernon, N.Y.

 

Otto Standke, 1920s

In March of 1888, Otto Standke made his entrance at the family farm in eastern Missouri, the sixth of seven children.

They all grew up in a white cottage surrounded by eighty acres of orchards and vineyards. The family’s great sorrow was that their father lost his hand and part of an arm in a terrible accident. Thereafter he relied on his wife to manage the farm work.

Caroline and William Standke were German immigrants who arrived in the U.S. around 1870. They met and married in Ohio—secretly, to avoid a “charivari”—and rode off in a spring wagon to start their life together in Missouri.*

Among their children, a few married and others moved to Atlanta, Toledo, and Little Rock. Otto stayed nearby. 

He was interested in new mechanical devices, such as the gramophone, and games like puzzles and magic tricks. A natural salesman, he got a job behind the counter at the Montgomery Ward store in Kansas City.

On the side, Otto made money in landscaping and raising chickens. He was also busy inventing machines and securing patents, he said, although there is no record that he ever received a patent.

During the 1930s he moved to Great Bend in central Kansas, where he soon became superintendent of parks with special responsibility for maintaining the grounds of the Barton County Courthouse.

There was a curse on this courthouse.  

Through the summer and into late fall, Otto raked, mowed, and trimmed to perfection. And every morning the lawn, benches, shrubs, statues, bandshell, and playground were coated in the white droppings of starlings.

 

"Super Glossy Starling" from
The New Natural History by Richard Lydekker
(1901)

It was an infestation. As dusk approached each afternoon, thousands of starlings swooped into town, flew to the square, and roosted in the trees until dawn. 

When the dirty, noisy birds first arrived in 1924, Great Bend vowed to get rid of them. Over the years, nothing worked.

But now that World War II had been won and the atomic age begun, Otto stepped forward with a secret plan.

And sure enough, Otto rid Great Bend of its starlings. He worked at night and no one knew exactly how he did it. “It’s a military secret,” he told reporters just before Wichita hired him to evict the starlings that roosted on its department stores.

By this time, Otto carried his equipment in a large double-locked metal box and dubbed himself “the world famed only successful starling chaser.” Moving on from Wichita, he banished the starlings from the federal building in Indianapolis. Louisville and Youngstown also requested his help.

Then, in 1958, he was called east.

Mount Vernon, N.Y., a 30-minute train ride north of New York City, had been plagued by starlings and grackles since 1924. But its problem was not confined to a few buildings or a park; the birds roosted citywide, although they did have a few favorite neighborhoods.

“Active warfare” is how Mayor William D. McQueston described battling the birds, estimated at 10,000 annually, during the late 1920s. The New York Times reported:

 

Last year policemen were placed on duty armed with riot guns with which they peppered the trees sheltering the birds. The fire department was called upon to use the high pressure system and sweep the trees free from the nests, and roman candles were used, the fiery balls temporarily scaring the birds from their nests.

Mount Vernon policemen shooting
at grackles, 1950s.

One of the streets most affected by the infestations was home to a man born in Mount Vernon in 1920. Dr. Perlman of Commonwealth Avenue probably remembered the starlings and grackles from his childhood. 

He must have read about Otto Standke in the newspaper and wrote to Mayor Joseph Vaccarella, urging him to hire the birdman. The mayor agreed. 

By now it was August 1959 and Mount Vernon’s trees cast deep, indispensable shade, rustling with birds or an imminent thunderstorm.

Soon Otto arrived. Wearing a red plaid cap and chomping on a stogie, he climbed out of a cab with his suitcase and mysterious metal box. He ran up the steps to the Hotel Hartley. He was a brisk 71 years old.

 

Hotel Hartley in better days. 

The next day, greeted by the mayor, the health commissioner, and the public works commissioner, Otto signed a five-page $4,000 contract that stipulated staggered payments based on results.

He started at twilight on Commonwealth Avenue.

Surrounded by children in pajamas and adults carrying umbrellas, Otto had no choice but to reveal what he carried in his box: two metal flappers six inches wide and two feet long and a shiny metal chime, also two feet long, which he wore around his neck.

He put the flappers on his hands and set forth, clapping and clanging. Everyone followed along talking and laughing. After a while, the birds flew away.

Alas, things didn’t work out for Mount Vernon and Otto. The city gave him a week to get rid of all the birds. After six twilight treatments, they were as profuse as ever. And Otto complained that only starlings, not grackles, responded to his equipment.

Both parties agreed to revise the contract and more treatments ensued. Two weeks later, the birds remained in Mount Vernon along with Otto, who spent his time arguing with city officials and conducting telephone interviews with reporters. 

EFFORT TO RID CITY OF BIRDS TOTAL FAILURE ran the headline in the Mount Vernon Daily Argus.

In mid-September, after the mayor announced that the city would not honor the contract, Otto departed. He had new jobs, he said, in Philadelphia and Cleveland.

Still hoping to get paid, Otto sent a few friendly postcards to Mount Vernon officials. That’s how they learned that ABC television producers had proposed to fly Otto out to Hollywood.

“If Otto had not come to Mount Vernon and got all that publicity about his little box and its mysterious contents,” a city commissioner remarked, “he probably never would’ve made television.”

Now let’s see. It can’t be just because he was a Kansas man!

Perhaps it’s because of his promises and bluster, his craving for importance.

Somehow Otto had the whiff of the Wizard of Oz.

 

 

 

 

*A charivari is a mock serenade to celebrate a wedding.

 

Through the Hourglass: The Bird Man Comes to Mount Vernon, N.Y.

 

Of Time and the Blizzard

Snowy day at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

The day before my father died last March, I moved in close to his right ear and asked him a few questions. 

“Do you remember Primrose Avenue?” I said.

That’s the name of a street near the house where we lived when my brother and I were growing up in Mt. Vernon, N. Y. 

Primroses are small colorful old-fashioned flowers. Primrose the street was pretty, too. It began in a vale (an appropriately antiquated word) near the business district, then meandered along, past a small park with lilac bushes and a few benches.  As it climbed a hill, the street widened with grand houses on either side, some with marble steps at the curb.  These had been used for carriages in the 1890s.  

Primrose Avenue postcard, around 1905

Now it is 2018 and a big storm has swirled into New York City.  Down on the street, you can hear the snow crashing into the wind.  I remember this sound from my childhood when snowstorms occurred routinely from November to March.  We trudged to school through banks, drifts and slush.  Sometimes the driving snow stung our eyes.

During the winter of 1970, a blizzard socked the New York metropolitan area. It lasted a few days.  I can still conjure that wonderful sense of being stuck inside.  Even if one had an appointment, it would be impossible to get there.  Everything was closed; only our homes were open for business. 

One night, the snow finally stopped.  Looking out the window, we saw a few flakes trickling down.  My father and I decided to take a walk.  In boots and layers of sweaters coats scarves hats gloves, we stepped outside.

We started around the block and came to Primrose Avenue.  The last foot of snow had not been plowed and we couldn’t find the sidewalk, so we walked up the middle of the street. 

I remember a pink glow, which must have been the snow reflecting the streetlight.  Also the crunch, crunch of our boots.  I also recall, dimly, our conversation.

My father reading to me (left) and my brother (right), early 1960s

My father was a talented writer and editor who worked largely with dry bureaucratic prose.  At heart, though, he had a true literary sensibility.  Because of him, there were volumes of Whitman, Dylan Thomas, Housman, and Keats in the house; also such novels as The Naked and the Dead, Of Human Bondage, and Johnny Got His Gun.  My mother recommended King’s Row and anything by John O’Hara, but he urged on me Lolita and You Can’t Go Home Again.

After his death, I found notes for the book reviews that he wrote during his years as a newspaper reporter.  It was a good way to make extra money and get free books. In 1947, for example, his reviews included All the King's Men and a thriller called The Big Clock.

Who knows why he also was reviewing Boswell’s Life of Johnson (published in 1791), but of it he noted simply: “Had to choke this one down.”

Back to Primrose Avenue. 

As we walked through the pink light and dwindling snowflakes, he imparted something magical to me.  I believe it involved the exhilarating connection between literature and experience.  The scene, the shadow, the words and characters – you could always return to them, or call them up.  And of course, what he said turned out to be true.

That’s why I’m glad that New York is finally getting a snowstorm, this snowstorm, the first one since his death.  It feels like I’ve crossed a continent to get back to Primrose Avenue and he’s there with me, talking and walking in the unplowed world.

Throughout his life, my father jotted down the titles
and authors of books he wanted to read.

Met photo by Claudia Keenan

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2018/01/of-time-and-blizzard.html

William H. Holmes & the Mt. Vernon Schools

Typical street on Mt. Vernon's North Side;
around 1913 when Dr. Holmes became superintendent

Superintendent Holmes was an intimidating man.  He could appear kindly when he spoke to a circle of children who gathered around him.  However, he preferred to be stern, his gray eyes blinking behind thick spectacles. 

“Come back when you have real experience,” he would tell new graduates of Teachers College when they came knocking on his door.  One applicant recalled a monolithic desk and booming voice.  She scurried away to teach in New Jersey.  Several years later, Holmes hired her.

In 1913, when Dr. Holmes became superintendent of schools in Mt. Vernon, N.Y., he arrived with a newly minted doctorate from Clark University.  He proudly carried his dissertation, The Individual Child, in his back pocket (figuratively speaking).  He had studied under G. Stanley Hall, a pioneer in the field of developmental psychology whose research on adolescence inspired education reform in the U. S.   

Hall had worked at the University of Leipzig with Wilhelm Wundt, a philosopher and physiologist whose experiments in the social aspects of human thought and behavior launched the field of psychology in 1879.

To say that Hall and Wundt were eminent falls far short of the mark.  More than a century later, all of their ideas have been disputed but their work remains influential.

Dr. Holmes meets with students, 1930s

Given these prestigious connections, the Mt. Vernon board of education considered itself fortunate to have landed Holmes, and he immodestly agreed.  But the new superintendent would face twentieth-century challenges for which his mentor had not prepared him.  

Enrollment in the four-square mile city – which had incorporated two decades earlier – was rising rapidly, as was the case in all of the nation’s cities.  Most residents called for more schools but some old-timers did not.  Opposition to high schools had been common during the nineteenth century; those feelings persisted here even as the Mt. Vernon school board commissioned plans to build a new one.    

Further, although Mt. Vernon was technically a suburb, its demographics were more urban than suburban.  Founded and controlled by Protestants, the city had been home to Irish and German immigrants during the 1870s.  Along came enough Jews to support two synagogues.  A small black community, established after the Civil War, grew slowly on the South Side of the city.

Certainly a far cry from the hamlets of Grafton and Upton, Mass., where Holmes had served previously as superintendent.

Finally, there were Italian immigrants, part of the late-nineteenth century wave of European immigration.  They were most detested and exploited by the city’s establishment.  The men found jobs as stone masons, digging the cut for the New York Central Railroad which would bisect the city of Mt. Vernon, much to its detriment later on. 

Italian artisans also created beautiful stone and tile work for the homes of wealthy suburbanites.  And when they got on their feet sufficiently to form their own construction companies, Italian-American contractors always held the winning bids to build new schools.  Among these was Mt. Vernon’s gleaming new academic high school, completed in 1914.

However, when it came time for the children of Italian immigrants to go to high school, most were consigned to Edison Vocational & Technical High School, not the aforementioned college preparatory school.  Black students also were directed to Edison.

It was an excellent place to learn a trade but the students were robbed of liberal arts degrees. 

At play: scene in a South Side elementary school, no date

Life would change for Mt. Vernon’s Italian immigrants, however.  Over the course of a generation, the community gained seats on the school board and eventually came to dominate city government.  

Unsurprisingly, the black community remained powerless.  Before the Great Migration, about 1,000 black students attended the public schools.  Yet “the Negro situation” was pronounced enough to draw the attention of the State Commissioner of Education. 

The commissioner and several state senators saw that Holmes had taken his cue from the board of education, which sanctioned inferior facilities in black neighborhoods.  And they wondered why black teachers were employed only in classes where white students constituted a very small minority.

“Many white persons would move from the neighborhood of any Mount Vernon school in which a Negro teacher had a position, and realty values would depreciate,” Dr. Holmes told a state legislative hearing, according to the New York Times.

“There was a storm of protest from parents when we once assigned a Negro substitute teacher,” said the school board president.

Mt. Vernon never integrated its elementary schools, so how could one have reasonably expected a measure of equity during the twenties and thirties?     

And yet, turning back to Superintendent Holmes, undeniably he gave his best to the schools over which he presided for 27 years.  Nearing retirement in 1940, he decided to write a history of the district.  It’s packed with photographs, charts, and self-adulation.

Here are some of the things he accomplished, in line with progressive education initiatives of the time:

       Separated the 7^th and 8^th grades from elementary school to form what he called the “central grammar school,” a forerunner of the junior high school,

        Introduced the “platoon system,” invented in 1907 by the enterprising superintendent of the Gary, Indiana schools.  Instead of staying in one classroom with one teacher all day long, students moved around for science, art, music, and physical education,

         Established a medical department to check the ears, eyes, chests, and teeth of poor children,

         Created supervised study periods for children who otherwise would do their homework "in poorly lit kitchens" and

         Organized a counseling program to offer students health, educational, social, vocational, and ethical guidance.

Under Holmes, the Mt. Vernon schools gained a fine reputation.  But the superintendent’s heart really lay back in the nineteenth century.  After he retired and returned to his native Maine, he became fixated on a rundown Victorian mansion in Portland.  He and his sister, Clara, bought it and started to restore it.  He died not long after, in 1948.

Today the Victoria Mansion is a flourishing tourist attraction and the Mt. Vernon public schools have seen far better days.  

See posts November 2, 2015; November 23, 2015; December 21 2015; May 18. 2016.

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2017/06/dr-holmes-mt-vernon-schools.html

Passing Through in the Seventies

Upon entering his shop, you bumped into a glass case

 full of what’s now called “Boho” jewelry. . . 

In the summer of 1971, I went hiking through Yellowstone National Park as part of a cross-country group trip sponsored by the YMCA.

We were walking along, minding our business, when a guy with a walrus mustache stepped out from behind a tree.

“Hey man,” he said, “want some acid? Want some red devils? Want some yellow-jackets?”

We said no thanks and scurried away; not feeling threatened, just uncertain.

That trip was my first exposure to the Midwest, the Plains, and the West Coast. We even swooped down to Tijuana.

Of course most of us were in our early teens and a bit too young to reflect deeply on some of the things we perceived –

Namely, the discomfort we engendered as fast-talking suburban kids.

You couldn’t miss it in the eyes of housewives when we descended on a laundromat in Abilene, Kansas, filling the machines and then sitting around waiting for the clothes to be done.

You could see parents gather their children when we swarmed into a diner near Colorado Springs. Everyone stood back. We drew wary attention wherever we went.  

One might think that the generation gap, still in the news at that time, had reared its head. But now I don’t think that’s the case.

It had more to do with the locals’ recognition that we came from out there, not here. That makes sense because in 1971, although most Americans owned a television, a culture gap persisted between those who lived within and those who lived outside of metropolitan areas.

Nothing new, of course. The 1920 U.S. census was the first in which more people resided in urban than rural regions. During the decade that followed, the expansion of radio and rise of mass culture enabled access to new information, fashion, and ideas no matter where one lived.

But one thing that did not change was the image of the dangerous city, with its corrupting influences, which prevailed in parts of the country with dwindling populations. People who believed and behaved differently – largely immigrants; also “city slickers,” “high society,” and other urban stereotypes – often aroused apprehension if not fear.  

So it’s not surprising that during the early 1970s, even a bunch of gregarious white kids could bring out strong feelings: Who is this? What is this?

After Los Angeles the tour wound down and we made short work of the rest of the trip, driving northeast through Missouri and Kentucky, on to the village of Nyack, N.Y., from whence we started.

And then how lovely to return to the hometown groove, back to Mt. Vernon, a place just as comfortably familiar as Abilene, Kansas, was to its citizens.

The ice cream store, dry cleaner, pharmacy, bakeries, stationers, Woolworth’s, Chinese restaurant – a streetscape still etched in my mind.  

And now, located between a funeral home and a pizzeria, something new had appeared: a store run by the man who had stepped from behind the tree in Yellowstone. It sure looked like him.

Of course it couldn’t be. This guy wasn’t selling drugs (so far as we could see).

Rather, upon entering his shop, you bumped into a glass case full of what’s now called “Boho” jewelry. Batik pillows, wood carvings, and ceramic incense holders covered various surfaces. Tie-dye shirts, dashikis, and peasant blouses hung in the back. And tumbling from the ceiling, spider plants suspended in macramé hangers. The latter were integral to the unfortunate decor of the seventies.

Already the counterculture had morphed into “over-the-counter culture,” to quote Susan Sontag.

In the course of a few encounters, we found the proprietor to be a very nice man. But how on earth did he land in Mt. Vernon? Definitely a miscalculation!

Our city’s young people, largely middle-class and racially and ethnically diverse, gravitated toward Army & Navy stores on the city’s South Side.

He would have fared better in the affluent village next door, where most of the kids actually wore love beads and walked around with lots of cash.

The store couldn’t last long. Within a year, it closed.

I wonder where he came from and where he went next; a hippie merchant, passing through in the seventies.

Collage by Claudia Keenan
 

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2016/08/passing-through-in-seventies.html

Through the Hourglass: Passing Through in the Seventies